Tag Archives: tdd

Early access beta of “Objects on Rails” Now Available

Often, at conferences and users group meetings, I find myself discussing the intersection of Ruby on Rails, Object-Oriented development, and Test-Driven Development, and I’ll mention something like “I prefer to develop my business objects first, and add ActiveRecord in later”. This usually leads to … Continue reading

Posted in Announcements, Books | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

Making a Mockery of TDD

I made this gnomic remark on Twitter the other day: To be a successful mockist, you must dislike mocks. A lot of people re-tweeted it, so I guess I’m not completely alone in thinking this way. I should back up … Continue reading

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5 things programmers preach but don’t practice

I’m having a frustrating day of merge hell. Just to blow off some steam while specs run, here are some things that, in my experience, are a lot more common in theory than in execution in proprietary software development projects. At … Continue reading

Posted in Rants | Tagged , , , , , | 55 Comments

Demeter: It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.

Is #try really so bad? In response to my recent post about #try being a code smell, a lot of people made the reasonable objection that the example I used—of using #try on a a Hash—was a pathological case. A … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 67 Comments

Linkdump #8

Scriptensity: Emscripten 1.0! This is the first I’ve heard of this project: it’s an LLVM-to-Javascript compiler. Which means you can (for instance) compile C++ to Javascript. I can’t decide if this is amazing or just batshit insane. Probably both. tags: … Continue reading

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Linkdump #7

Hacker Chat: Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good, and More Wise words. tags: development I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time … Continue reading

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RSpec is for the literate

A couple years ago I wrote a library called AlterEgo. It’s an implementation of the State Pattern for Ruby. I consider the library to be retired at this point—other libraries, such as State Machine and ActiveModel, have since incorporated all … Continue reading

Posted in Rants | Tagged , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Roy Osherove on Test Construction

It’s quite easy to get caught up in the technique of TDD and not pay attention to the way unit tests are written: their naming, how maintainable or readable they are, and whether they test the right things or might … Continue reading

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TDD Accelerates Development

Periodically, well-meaning Agile advocates will make the argument that practicing Test-Driven Development trades development speed for better quality. That is, it slows you down but it’s worth it because the resulting code is better. Rubbish, I say. TDD makes me … Continue reading

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Testing Private Methods

Periodically the question of how to test private methods comes up at work or online. My answer is: don’t. It may seem trite, but there is some reasoning behind it. Private methods are, by definition, implementation details. If you are … Continue reading

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